August 31, 2004

Hivelogic Redesign

Well, Dan Benjamin made mention of it a little while ago, but now it has come to fruition. I realize this is now bordering on old news, but the new Hivelogic design is live. I have always enjoyed Dan’s site and writing, so when I approached him about his dissatisfaction with his site’s design, I couldn’t help but jump at the chance to try my hand at helping to reface it. Dan’s web development skills are mighty, making my email addresses safe and my URL’s valid (just to mention a few things); teaming up with him on this was an honor. Let it also be known, although Dan claims to be a poor designer, he has never made a particularly bad design. It was great to help put a new face to his already big reputation.

I originally offered to design a logo and masthead for the site. The name “Hivelogic” is wonderful sounding and happens to have pleasing letter forms that look good in just about any decent font. As I sat down to do it, I thought about what really fit with the site’s personality. The stuff I had come up with matched up with Dan’s perceptions entirely. Hivelogic is refined. Hivelogic is savoring a fine cigar. Hivelogic is traditional with a twist. Dan wanted to keep it similar in feel to previous Hivelogics in terms of palette and tone, therefore, minimalism, greyscale and blue were on the menu.

It seemed natural to embody the site’s voice in logo form with an ornate face, and some subdued flourishes. The logo is capped off with a single mark, a wax seal with a double-cross-barred “H”; a small accent hinting to the site’s offbeat writing and personality.

I was very pleased with the results for the masthead and had some more time on my hands so I threw together a quick layout (more a layout suggestion than a full design). Dan liked the whole kaboodle and ended up using the logo and masthead as well as keeping the basic layout concept and palette I created. Dan brought the site together beautifully. He injected a bit more of himself, added some tweaks to the design, and completely rewrote his custom CMS from the ground up. Make no mistake, Dan does not mess around. Congratulations, Dan. I am glad I could help out. Your site looks hot.

Saint Arved - I am not having trouble viewing them in Mozilla or IE, even on my wide screen. Care to give some more info? What’s more, I was just responsible for the design work, if there is a rendering problem with the finished site you might do well to email Dan.

Gabriel - I understand what you are saying, though, realism wasn’t my goal here. I trimmed the seal down to the bare essentials, it wasn’t key for it to appear rendered and realistic, the point was to imply the form and shape of the wax seal.

He’s right, I ended up redrawing most of the “H” because I didn’t like the way it looked with the rest of the word spatially, or the way it misbalanced the “g”. The other “H” in the wax seal was entirely hand-done, though inspired by Garamond.